November 12, 2012

Coat muslin 2.0

I had the day of today, so there was time to work on the coat pattern. I wore the shirt I posted about yesterday, tucked into the red skirt. Just mentioning it ;) I never like getting zero comments to a blog post but I guess that teaches me for doing hasty posts with bad pictures... (also, to get rid of a certain kind of spam, I recently disabled anonymous comments on the blog, I thought that would hardly effect real comments but I have had an email about it. I just changed the settings back, I hope the spammers have already left).Unfortunately, in this post, I once more only have some very hasty pictures on offer.I drafted this pattern based on the Marion design. I didn't add a collar yet, I plan on using the original Marion collar. Please ignore the fact that I accidentally cut the center front pieces 10 cm shorter than the other ones (I didn't draw the full skirt length on paper...) and the wonky pinning.

First of all: this coat actually fits me. And you can see a body shape in it as well! I'm even fairly satisfied with the way the sleeves fit at the top of the shoulder. And the skirt now falls pretty much like a lot of redingote skirts in vintage pictures. With just a couple of tweaks, this could be a rather nice coat.But then, there's a lot I don't really like. Those sleeves are too tight at armscye. There is a way to draft them, set lower, with ease at the upper arm allowing for a good range of movement. I also don't like how little space the raglan bits occupy on the bodice. Being more used to full raglan sleeves than to this pointy half variaty, I must have been far too modest drawing them in... I'm thinking about re-drafting the sleeves to adress these issues. I also think I would like the skirt to be a bit fuller yet. For this version, I simply followed the angle of the lines just below the waist which gives this form-fitting flare. There's nothing wrong with it but I'd like a more spectacularly skirted coat. And of course, the skirt also needs to be longer. Along the same "it's actually not bad but I'd like it to be different"-line, I will tweak the bodice a bit. It's a tiny bit snug at the bust, which is easily remedied. It has a normal fit at the waist by today's standards but I think I will tighten it up just a little bit there to get a bit more of that 1950's look.And then there are the pockets. I copied the design from the Marion coat but I'm still a lot less then thrilled with them. I'm going to abandon the the curved scoop pockets in favour of somewhat draped stick-out pockets like those on my skirt. Those new pockets will also be placed a bit lower.All in all, I think I will need to make another muslin. So, what started out as a fun little vintage thing is actually turning into one of thoseprojects...

It is looking very promising; with such a lovely feminine shape. Muslins can be hard to gauge when the quality of the materials are very different from each other... the hang and the stiffness will be quite different. I'm sure the final coat will be, like all your creations, superbly fitted and tailored :)I've considered disabling anonymous too, but a few of my regular commenters (genuine people) seem to prefer this method. Also, the blogger spam filter seems to be very effective and very efficient. I get up to 100 spam comments a day, nearly all those pharmaceutical ones, or for online stores; but they get no further than the spam box. I check it regularly for "real" comments which I transfer to the blog, and just delete the rest.Thanks so much for your kind comment too; your words meant such a lot to me.